The Role of Web Usage Mining in Web Applications Evaluation

The role of Web applications in corporate business has changed due to strong market competition and improved clients' negotiation power, imposing a new approach to their quality evaluation, in a sense that some analysis should be made prior to the implementation phase in order to reduce errors and inconsistencies in application design, while after the implementation, visiting scenarios and visitors' usage habits should be analyzed. The most common approach to the later task is to mine web access logs enriched by semantic information - web usage mining, in order to discover patterns hidden in data obtained through interaction of users on the web. In the paper we firstly provide a brief overview of data preprocessing, pattern discovery and pattern analysis steps of web mining and of most common pattern discovery methods. The remaining section demonstrates a practical example of Web site evaluation.